I’m the founder/president of Brand Keys, Inc. the NY-based brand loyalty and customer engagement consultancy. I’ve pioneered work in loyalty, emotional engagement and predictive metrics creating the Customer Loyalty Engagement Index (examining 83 categories and 598 brands), and the Sports Fan and Women’s Wear Daily Fashion Brand Indices. My first book, Predicting Market Success, provided a 21st century paradigm for loyalty. My current book, The Certainty Principle, deals with engagement in a more complex, cross-channel marketplace. I’m a two-time winner of the Advertising Research Foundation’s “Research Innovator” award, and in 2008, New York University’s communication school declared me “the most-quoted brand consultant in the United States.” In 2012 we introduced the Digital Platform GPS, a review of 14 digital platforms and their engagement effects in 83 B2C and B2B categories. I can be reached at robertp@brandkeys.com.

Barnes and Noble: Getting Out In The Nook Of Time

Some commiseration for B&N. The once-great brick-and-mortar citadel of books – You remember books? Made of paper. Weighed about a pound and a quarter. You had to turn the pages by hand – has been assailed by the digital revolution. And customer’s emotional engagement expectations.

Real books haven’t paid off for them like they did in the pre-ebook era. B&N did respond with their ebook, Nook, but revenues have dropped there too, year-over-year, by about 35%. They announced the other day that they’ll stop making the Nook color tablets. They’ll continue to offer the basic black-and-white e-readers, but they won’t be doing the manufacturing for the tablet line, and instead will work with a yet-to-be-named partner to make and co-brand that line of products.

Too little, too late? You have to give B&N credit for trying to keep up with competition like Amazon and AppleApple, but it doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines that B&N is looking to exit the hardware end of the business. Earlier this week the company said they were planning to dramatically slash prices. And the decline of dedicated readers of ebooks hasn’t helped their situation either. E-readers had a two-year lead on tablets, and by then the marketplace had pretty much cleared out the early adopters, who thought it cool to be able to carry around their library in something that fit in a (large) pocket and weighed just south of 8 ounces.

Now when you look at what consumers expect, emotionally and technologically (if your answer is “everything,” you are 100% correct!), the brands and products able to meet – sometimes even exceed – those expectations, are the brands seeing positive consumer behavior in the marketplace and posting profits. When you look at what consumers “expect” from an e-reader (the Ideal for any category configured at 100%), e-readers now rate 74% (down 11% from 6 months ago). Tablets rate 96% (up 4% in that same time period). You do the math. There’s probably a calculator app someplace on your tablet.

Brand success and sales and attendant profits, always take place within the paradigm of high (and higher) consumer expectations for what drives brand engagement. Most of the really important ones are emotionally-based. In this case, the most-important drivers are All-in-One Convenience and Organic Operations. Real engagement measures can identify these 12 to 18 months before they show up in traditional research or get articulated in focus groups.

The trick to being successful, of course, is making sure you’re able to read the emotional engagement drivers in your category correctly – and read ahead of the competition.

Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.

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